Category Archives: Epic Environments

Wetlands in Cape May, New Jersey, USA. View of Fishing Creek Marsh with Miami Beach, New Jersey on the left. from U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Digital Visual Library

Wetlands

When we write faraway magical places, cultures, and creatures we are inspired by the real world. Nothing you could make up is half as weird as Mother Nature already has. If you plan to make any environment a part of your storytelling, you could do worse than go watch a couple of nature documentaries. Look what nature does, and then fantasy-fy it a little. All the creatures in the Sivatag Desert or the Floating City are inspired by real creatures, even if those inspirations are taken in unusual and fantastical directions.

That’s what you get for having a biologist on the team, who asks questions like “what are the nesting habits of kraken?” or “what are the evolutionary environmental pressures of sleeping on gold?”

Where the adventure is set matters. How you get there is part of the story.

So today, to get to the Next Place, your party have to travel through a swamp. Apart from getting their boots wet, what kind of effects does this have on your adventure? Why not just avoid describing the landscape?

Because yet another forest is boring. Because investigating a different ecosystem at the very least provides for different monsters to fight. Because just getting from A to B becomes a challenge – a reason to have the Survival skill, a reason to hire a native guide. Because the real world is diverse and beautiful and bizarre, and therefore the fantasy worlds we build really should be even more so.

There are many different types environments in this world – from hot wet swamps, to harsh desert to dry sheets of ice. Each environment brings with it new challenges for the people to live through.

The shape, and movement of our round world means that it can be cold in one place and warm in another and the same for night and day. Due to the tilt of the world’s rotation both the far north and south go through months without light, and even when they do have light the sun never comes much above the horizon, leaving the world with lands of ice.

Photo by Ian Mackenzie from Ottawa, Canada

Lands of Ice

Much of the world can become frozen under sheets of ice throughout the cold times, but some parts never fully thaw; Greenland, the Arctic, Antarctic and Alaska are just a few of these places. These kind of places can experience anything from a month to 6 months without sunlight, temperatures getting as low -90oc, with -50oc being commonplace in some.

When the land is covered in snow and ice there is very little food for people and animals, since not much grows for half the year there are no trees to help slow down the wind, the wind speed can get as high as 50 knots in ice storms.